Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka, 2012, nr 20 (40)
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Item Miłosz w dialogu z literackim centrum świata(2012) Bill, Stanley S.In 1986 Bernard Pivot, a French journalist and literary critic, conducted an interview with Miłosz in the television feature called Apostrophes. The conversation was an archetypal example of an encounter between a representative of the “literary centre” and an envoy from what Pascale Casanova later called “une petite littérature”. The present article discusses Miłosz’s contradictory relations with France as a centre of “world’s republic of letters”, against the background of his difficult dialogue with Pivot, and the wider context of Casanova’s theory of inequalities in the literary world. On the one hand, Miłosz felt wiser than French litterateurs, and frequently pointed out to their political naiveness and ignorance of history and the cruel reality of the world. On the other hand, however, Miłosz’s sense of superiority over Western culture was always dialectically linked to the other side of the coin: the rage of a provincial poet at the headquarters of the cultural and economical power.Item Miłosz wobec Brzozowskiego. O "Człowieku wśród skorpionów..." i nie tylko(2012) Panek, SylwiaThe aim of the author of the article is to investigate Miłosz’s relation to Stanisław Brzozowski. Proceeding from the interpretation of Miłosz’s Człowiek wśród skorpionów..., and diagnosing his personal motivation for turning to Brzozowski’s works in 1963, the author investigates the avenues of dialogue between Miłosz and Brzozowski, and their unsystematically expresses common points. The article, thus, presents various stages of influence of Brzozowski’s work and ideas on Miłosz: from the 1930s, when Miłosz was inspired by Brzozowski’s left-wing fanaticism, through the common opposition against anti-intellectualism and the Polish identity understood as a set of Romantic symbols and gestures, up to the fascination with Russian culture and Marxism. The deepest affinity of both authors seems to be the attitude of anthropocentrism, identified and exposed by Miłosz himself, and understood as hostility towards nature and belief in nature’s determinism, but also as a formula that gives coherence to the philosophical themes, found in both authors’ work, which are thought to be polarised and incompatible. In the conclusion, the author of the article states that positioning himself with reference to Brzozowski was, for Miłosz, a tool of self-creation, an attempt to control the reception and interpretation of his own work, and to place Miłosz in a separate and exceptional position, akin to the position of Brzozowski, the extraordinary and unrecognized philosopher and critic of Polish early modernism.Item Prawda marginesu (notatki z lektury)(2012) Próchniak, PawełThe essay presents remarks about the category of “the margin” in modern Polish literature, and also an interpretation of Zbigniew Kopeć’s book, Niepokorni. Brudni. Źli. Ludzie marginesu w prozie polskiej XX wieku [The Angry, The Dirty, The Bad: People of the Margin in Polish Fiction of the 20th Century]. The truth of the margin emerges from an encounter with sheer existence, with life on the bottom, in places marked by suffering and evil, places that are sick, pathological, revulsive, and consequently abandoned by the better-off part of the society. A literature that approaches such places attempts to be a quest for pure and simple truth that is touching and deeply human. Kopeć’s and the present author’s remarks, presented in the article, are dedicated to such attempth made by Polish fiction writers of the 20th century.Item „Potworna zdrada”. O źródłach kontrowersyjności adaptacji "Doliny Issy"(2012) Kaniecki, PrzemysławThe author attempts to identify the origins of the famous argument between Miłosz and Konwicki about the film adaptation of Dolina Issy. Konwicki created a film which, although it is an adaptation of the novel, clearly belongs to his own creative output, focused on axiological uncertainty after The Second World War. Konwicki’s work is a record of a quest for enduring points of reference, a quest conducted with realisation that such points cannot be found by a person who feels lost in the modern world. Such a world-view was not acceptable for Miłosz, and it is difficult to expect that the poet would accept an adaptation of his novel created from such a point of view.Item „Książka nieufności”. O "Rosji" Czesława Miłosza(2012) Wedemann, MarekThe article is a review of an extensive, two-volume collection of Miłosz’s statements entitled Rosja. Widzenia transoceaniczne [Russia: Transoceanic Views]. The reviewer, apart from a standard presentation and evaluation of the published work, attempts to discover a deeper sense of the decision to publish, “here and now”, Miłosz’s statements on Russian issues. The collection, which rounds up previously unknown texts written between 1936 and 2004, makes it possible to understand Miłosz’s writings on Russia as a continuation of Marian Zdziechowski’s essays written between the wars, where uncompromising denunciation of the “Eastern peril” was combined with deep respect and sympathy for a Russia that was not imperial.Item „Mogę powiedzieć [...], że jednak — jestem”. Czesława Miłosza sposoby odkrywania siebie(2012) Telicki, MarcinThe article discusses the plausibility of Joanna Zach’s concept described as the “poetic of confession”. “Self discovery” is, for Miłosz, related to Romantic and early-Modernist sources of creative expression, and to poetry as a specific confession of faith. This, in turn, assumes an unending tension between biography, immersed in concrete reality, and its textual representation (the truth of life is confronted with the truth of poetry). What follows is that for Miłosz the key category is experience, suspended between history and the present, and between reality and its textual transformation.Item Miłosz o ciele, starości i umieraniu. Nowy język czy dramat (nie)wyrażania?(2012) Pietrych, KrystynaThe article discusses Miłosz’s poetic strategies of expression in problems of the body, illness, getting old, and the impending death. Those problems are closely related to Miłosz’s personal experience. The autobiographical plane adds dramatism to Miłosz’s experiments in developing a new poetic language in his old age. Especially in Farther Surroundings seems to develop a new poetical diction in the epistemological sense. The dark tone of the poet is still present, but it gradually weakens and is replaced by words that unambiguously praise (perhaps overpraise) existence, and so reveal their (self)persuasive quality. In this perspective the profusion of texts, which Miłosz wrote in his last years, is evidence of not only of an impressive intellectual power, but also of a drama that was covered by an overload of words.Item Stała interpretacyjna: status rzeczy w poezji Wallace’a Stevensa(2012) Bartczak, KacperStevens’s poems grant a curious status to material reality. Famously abstract, they refuse to abandon the realm of the material. Rather, “material reality” is inseparable from “abstract” concepts. Stevens’s position is pragmatist: the status and significance of material objects is founded by the entirely human linguistic/mental activity, which is also an interpretive activity. The poem is a site of initiating this activity. As such, Stevens’s poetics remains in opposition to other aesthetic positions: the linguistic idealism of Mallarmé, the metaphysical realism of Miłosz and Herbert, and the material realism of Ponge and American “objectivists”. While the metaphysical positions tend to overcome the material, the realistic poets will reify it by “taking the side of things”. Stevens’s poetic pragmatism sees no lure in the extra-material, while also refusing to see matter as meaningful in itself, beyond the human interpretive activity.Item Tropy akowskie w poezji Jerzego Ficowskiego(2012) Kandziora, JerzyThe article presents the evolution of the theme of Armia Krajowa (Home Army) and the Warsaw Uprising, in Ficowski’s poetry. The theme, engaged by the poet in the late 1940s (Ołowiani żołnierze, 1948), was quickly abandoned as incompatible with the imaginary, magical direction in the development of young Ficowski’s poetry. Neither was the theme fostered by the general political background of the “dead season” of Communist Poland, by censorship, and by Ficowski’s fear of settling for the post-Romantic stereotype and patriotic myth-making. The theme returned in the 1970s (Gryps, 1979; Errata, 1981), which was related to Ficowski’s decision to liberate himself from self-censorship, and his readiness to express the once repressed content in his own, mature poetic idiom. The present study presents two aspects of historical narration in the Home-Army poems from the 1970s: the fabulous quality, which positions history in Ficowski’s private topics and intimate memory, and the scientific, naturalistic quality, which relates history to physical and cosmic categories. Both aspects redeem the poetry from the narrow specificity of Polish national myth, and make it possible to reconcile individual truth of the experience of death and suffering with the discourse of concepts and historiosophy, which also touches upon the cosmic order.Item Czesław Miłosz w poszukiwaniu innej historyczności(2012) Herlth, JensThe article presents an analysis of the concept of “historicity”, which seems to be crucial for the understanding of the philosophical foundations of Miłosz’s work. The poet’s intention is to find a solution for the double dilemma of modern historical imagination: on the one hand, you should not become prey to the “murderous historicité”, but on the other, human life, when totally deprived of the historical dimension, seems to be empty and worthless. Miłosz found a solution of the dilemma in Stanisław Brzozowski’s philosophy, especially in his idea of of indispensability of historical consciousness, that is of “amplification” of historicity. The paradoxical, at first sight, attempt to overcome the disastrous consequences of historical thought through amplification of historicity itself, is seen in a wider contest of 20th-century philosophical investigations (Michaił Bachtin, Martin Heidegger, Barbara Skarga). It turns out that poetic discourse is the right place for its realization.Item Miłosza pobyty w równoległych (przekładowych) światach(2012) Rajewska, EwaThe well known interpretation of Miłosz’s work as an attempt to capture fulness, has been most fully formulated by Jan Błoński’s “Miłosz jak świat” [“Miłosz like a World”]. The author of the article provides a more detailed version of the interpretation, presenting Miłosz’s work as a multiplied universe: in translation and in self-translation. Miłosz’s universe has been multiplied through translation: undertaking translation of so many and so various poets, Miłosz, by extension, translated their poetic worlds. In doing so, he had to go beyond the borders of the world of his own idiom and imagination. Miłosz’s attempts at transgression beyond the borders of his own language and imagination, and into a poetic “parallel universe”, are conducted, according to the present author, in two ways: through similarity and through completion. Miłosz translates works which he which he selected on the principle of an exceptional poetic kinship (for example in his Excerpts from Useful Books). Other translations were an opportunity to test himself on an intriguing poetic material, which he himself would not be willing to create (for example in poetry by Anna Świrszczyńska).Item Czesław Miłosz i Walt Whitman: przekład jako prawdziwa obecność(2012) Nieukerken van, ArentMiłosz’s later poetry attempts to overcome the (post)modernist gap between the author as a textual effect and the subject of autobiography. An important stage on this road was his poetry book (in fact, a long poem in its own right) Nieobjęta ziemia [Unattainable Earth]. Its form is clearly dialogical. The collection mixes authorial poems with various examples of “heteroglossia”. Particularly striking is the prominent presence of Walt Whitman’s poetry. Whitmanian poetics assume that fully experiencing reality presupposes the existence of a community. The task of poetry consists in conceiving artistic structures that, when they are “concretized”, allow the reader to participate in such a community. Nieobjęta ziemia tries to come to terms with the Whitmanian challenge. The poetical subject in this somewhat modified example of the modern “sylva rerum” experiences its link with the “other” by an individual reception of artifacts that point to the communal essence of humanity. Nieobjęta ziemia , realizing community in the field of poetics “performatively”, incorporates these artifacts into the text. Particularly important seems to be the role played by poems translated by Miłosz himself (they are explicitly labeled as translations), and that represent the human condition called by Whitman “en masse”.Item Czesław Miłosz „o sobie samym jako (o) innym”: Miłosz — Ricoeur(2012) Rydz, AgnieszkaThe article is thematically related to the fundamental essay by the French hermeneutic philosopher, On Oneself as Another, which discussed with reference to Miłosz’s later writings (poetry and essays). The autobiographical quality of Miłosz’s expression is discussed through the concept of “otherness” as presented by Ricoeur. The discussion is conducted in the framework of triple relation of a subjective “I”: to one’s body, to the Other, and to one’s conscience. Miłosz, in his later works, responds to the ailings of the body with understanding, or even a sort of tenderness. Similar emotions are evoked by his contact with the Other, embodied by his ancestors and contemporaries. The responsibility for another person, however, and the communion with fellow people, are related, in his work, with the category of conscience. An attempt to narrate “oneself as another” allowed the Polish poet to reduce the seemingly irremovable rift between an artist and “the human family”; that rift was for Miłosz a troublesome legacy of modernism.Item Miłosz w sporze z formą poetycką(2012) Kluba, AgnieszkaCzesław Miłosz accompanied his poetry with an extensive body of self-reflective writings, developed over many years. It is characterised by, on the one hand, a relative constancy of recurring motifs, and on the other, an equally constant tendency to juxtapose the motifs in variously defined binary systems. The analysis of connections that occur not so much between the elements of specific antinomies, but, on a higher level, between separate antinomies (especially between values ascribed to poles of the oppositions), makes it possible to notice that many of the antinomies cannot be subjected to easy reconciliations, but rather exclude each other. This makes it possible to understand why Miłosz’s thought seems to be systematic. Above all, however, it allows us to look, in a new way, at the feats of Miłosz’s constant struggle against poetic form - immanent contradictions and inconsistencies of Miłosz’s reflection become interesting only when they are referred to the order of creation and its disturbing metamorphoses.Item Język „młodzieńczego Weltschmerzu”. O skutkach i korektach „gnostyckiego doświadczenia egzystencji”(2012) Stankowska, AgataThe article is about the role of gnosis and gnosticism in Miłosz’s world-view and aesthetic. This influence has been discussed identified by numerous researchers, and the direct stimulus for the present author was an extensive and well-informed study by Zbigniew Kaźmierczyk, Dzieło demiurga [Demiurge’s Work], where the critic interprets one of Miłosz’s juvenile collection Trzy zimy [Three Winters] as a record of gnostic experience of existence. Kaźmierczyk, who is a convinced proponent, and competent practitioner of the gnostic key to interpretation of Miłosz’s poetry, presents a highly coherent of Miłosz’s second book of poetry, read through complicated gnostic metaphors, which prevents the critic from a definite description of Miłosz as a gnosticist. The poet is rather describes as only (or so much as) a consciously selective user of imagery typical for gnosticism. Incisive analyses of topics in Trzy zimy, which fill chapter after chapter of Dzieło demiurga, convincingly argue that Miłosz’s juvenile foray into the world of dualistic images was not ephemeric or accidental, but rather had lasting and important consequences. Simultaneously, because of their purity and specific inwardness, they provoke a discussion of the role of this imagery, and the related convictions, in Miłosz’s post-war work, when he wrote Rescue; this issue is presented extensively in the article. The absorbing and fascinating description, fascinating in itself, of Miłosz’s juvenile imagination, presented by the author of Dzieło demiurga, is presented as a perfect background for discussion of further Manichean themes in Miłosz’s poetry. In a wider context, the article presents also the basic anthropological problems in Miłosz’s work, problems that arise from his juvenile experience of Weltschmerz, and which he radically overcame in his later years.